Don’t Cry for Me, Europa

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7 Responses

  1. Avatar Michael Samarin says:

    This Cathedral is to be seen as yet another fruit of our Faustian spirit. Christianity, in particular Catholicism, has been present across the world, yet only the Europeans could produce grand Cathedrals… Because of who we aryans are, because we have the same promethean impulse that made us go to the moon, not because of any religion. Don’t reduce a purely EUROPEAN achievement to Abrahamic religion.

    • Avatar Malić says:

      As to every other Aryan rejecting “desert religions”, etc. I extend to you a permanent invitation to go all the way as Nietzsche did before you.

  2. Avatar Mihai Marinescu says:

    It is interesting how these “white nationalist”, alt/new right groups end up being very similar in nature to the EU technocrats and to the whole liberal democratic establishment.
    He posits an alleged European common identity outside (even opposed to) Christianity. Of course, this is not techno-bureaucratic like the EU, but a sort of “organic”, racial identity. Of course, unlike the EU- who tries to embody its utopia in its institutions- this “aryan identity”, on the other hand, exists only at the level of imagination.

    As for the Nietzschean invitation, there is no chance for that: these post-modern right wing movements are on the level of Scooby-Doo cartoons.

  3. Avatar Han Fei says:

    I always hear the words Faustian spirit repeated ad nauseam over at places like CC. My question is to these folks – did you ever read Faust? The entire metaphor of Faust as used by Goethe (when it went further than a mere cautionary tale) was a thinly veiled disillusionment with the promises of the Enlightenment. Later on Spengler would cite this phrase to describe in his pessimistic tone, the complementing hubris to European success and achievement that resulted in exhaustion and decline. Given the context of this metaphor, to place the “faustian spirit” at the helm of Europe’s successes and achievements is to literally ascribe them to the “Judeo-Christian” devil. Even more ironic is to note that the Faustian tale shares the same premise as the earlier Jewish Golem myth.

    I do not necessarily agree with Mr. Malic that the West owes everything to the post-Chalcedonian faith, especially which authoritatively prevailed there after 1054. But since he’s a Christian, he can be at least justified by seeking answers in his country’s clearly defined tradition that dated back millennia.

    My view is that the tradition which Christianity springs out from, and the way it took hold in Europe was deeply European in the most sincere sense of the word. The pagans who claim that Christianity assimilated much of the pagan custom and belief at least understand half of the question, though they don’t realize to what extent they underwrite their own position by admitting this. The bottom line is that there is no more such thing as “desert religion” as there is “judische physik”.

    • Avatar Malić says:

      I believe that difference between Latins and the Greeks, as they called each other at the time of the first formal schism, was minimal and, if not, it was not a difference one would recognize today, especially if trying to find that one, individual, moment that formed subsequent history. As for Faust, yes that’s the thing with slurs – everybody’s talking about poor doctor and no one read Goethe’s work, which is itself drenched in Middle Ages. By this I mean the mentality Goethe lays out in his tragedy: it is genuinely different from modern one, or, perhaps you kinda get a glimpse of how the modernity emerges from the Middle Ages. “Faust” is a modern work through and through, make no mistake. But there’s a distinct connection to the past in it that is not merely reiterating symbolism of the age – you actually have a feeling of being there throughout the first part of the book. You have something like this in Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus” also, believe it or not. It’s not easy to rationally lay out how they accomplish to conjure this feeling of continuity, but I think that with effort, literary critic would even be able to explain it to some extent.

      In my view, the thing is that Goethe was a man immersed in time, the very opening lines (Zueigung – dedication) of “Faust” are about this (this English rendering butchers the original, but I don’t have time to translate it myself:

      Again you show yourselves, you wavering Forms,
      Revealed, as you once were, to clouded vision.
      Shall I attempt to hold you fast once more?
      Heart’s willing still to suffer that illusion?
      You crowd so near! Well then, you shall endure,
      And rouse me, from your mist and cloud’s confusion:
      My spirit feels so young again: it’s shaken
      By magic breezes that your breathings waken.

      You bring with you the sight of joyful days,
      And many a loved shade rises to the eye:
      And like some other half-forgotten phrase,
      First Love returns, and Friendship too is nigh:
      Pain is renewed, and sorrow: all the ways,
      Life wanders in its labyrinthine flight,
      Naming the good, those that Fate has robbed
      Of lovely hours, those slipped from me and lost.

      They can no longer hear this latest song,
      Spirits, to whom I gave my early singing:
      That kindly crowd itself is now long gone,
      Alas, it dies away, that first loud ringing!
      I bring my verses to the unknown throng,
      My heart’s made anxious even by their clapping,
      And those besides delighted by my verse,
      If they still live, are scattered through the Earth.

      I feel a long and unresolved desire
      For that serene and solemn land of ghosts,
      It quivers now, like an Aeolian lyre,
      My stuttering verse, with its uncertain notes,
      A shudder takes me: tear on tear, entire,
      The firm heart feels weakened and remote:
      What I possess seems far away from me,
      And what is gone becomes reality.

      The last line in German: “Was ich besitze seh’ ich wie im Weiten, Und was verschwand wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten” or “What I have, I’m watch now as if in distance, and what passed away is coming by me as real”, frankly says it all for me.

      I wonder whether anyone nowadays reiterating that “Faustian spirit” formula can evoke in himself this mood of flowing back to the root of time. And this is something a lot of German authors share as a motive, from Spengler to Mann. For my money, German liberal Thomas Mann captures and partly fulfills it better than most in his “Dr. Faustus”. So one might ask, how liberal was him if he was so drenched in the times long gone that came to speak through him? And isn’t being liberal just a label of identity, used for day to day superficial purposes, while deeper down a whole different thing is going on?

      The trouble with 20th Century philosophy and/or theology of history, whether the one “reacting” to rationalism or the one embracing it, is that it seems to be moving on the flat surface: supposedly given the idea, the consequence must follow systematically; if Mann is a liberal, Protestant and homosexual he is to produce something ideologically liberal, Protestant and homosexual; if Scholastics uses syllogism, than it is rationalizing and paganizing the Divinity, because all this modern rationalism must have some discernable root so why not pinpoint it there. Every time you start to look into details, those historical constructs start to fall apart.

      So goes for the “Faustian man” also.

  4. Avatar RC says:

    Oscar Wilde remarked about “desert religions”:
    These people believe in what they don’t see, and don’t believe what they see.

    As inheritors of Christianity, European consciousness is a spiritual power house. They’ve done away with any sort of relation to nature long ago. Therein lies their magnificence and utter danger when they lose their way.
    Now they wish to do away with God but their spiritualized consciousness remains.
    Throw your self on a cause. Die/kill for it, that’s your prerogative.
    They wish they had a relation to nature, but their science betrays them.
    Science as a spiritual practice – this is Faustian. TRUTH always was the objective ie God always was the objective.
    What is a spiritual super charged consciousness without spirit?
    Just a burnt out cathedral. That no one can recognize. Ironically that was the only progress from their brutality.

    What a tragedy.

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